It’s that green-grey mist again. Thick weather like this feels gloomy but it softens the world too. The mist diffuses light everywhere, there’s no shadows. It’s like the whole frame is out of focus.
To be honest I haven’t been reading or thinking about much stuff the last week aside form what I’m supposed to be, I’ve got onto a bit of a PhD-roll so I’m just focussing on that stuff. I spent my weekend (when not on the bike) reading Wiebe Bijker and social construction of technology stuff to try and cap off the chapter I’m coming to a middle-to-end on. When the spirit moves you, you know?
I had an interesting discussion with a student last week about automated design and creative processes. I suppose she was thinking about the types of jobs and roles that might emerge and this Unity workflow sprang to mind. Basically it’s a system that takes photoscans and automates the porting of them into models. It can clean up messy bits and best-guess materials from contextual information. Strikes me as an altogether good thing, a lot of that particular workflow, is slow, painful and easy to get wrong. The payoff is that when you get it right you’ve jumped a whole load of hoops setting up quality materials and models. However, unlike manually modelling and generating materials, there’s a lot more unknowns and potentials for error which Unity seem to be assuaging here.
There’s a lot of creative work that will probably be better automated, the laborious work of correcting errors in photoscans being one. Now the critical practitioner in me hasn’t had enough coffee yet to be fully screaming at me saying ‘yeah automation of creative processes is better in some instances’ but is certainly disquieted by the notion that I might be ok with aesthetic decisions on CGI being automated by computation. This is after all, a big chunk of my work at the moment. I suppose I come at this from the ‘we’re all going to be automated out of a job!’ argument. It is no-one’s job specifically to correct photoscan data for import. That’s just part of the designer’s workflow and if you can cut that out then you might cut time out of what are often ridiculously exploitative working hours in games and animation.
Anyway, I also want to start playing around with photoscans. The last time I did was sort of in the first hype curve, using 123D-Catch on a iPhone 5 and I imagine it’s significantly better now.
Recents
Natalie and I did another panel for long-time friends Impakt festival. This year’s theme was carbon neutrality so it was somewhat fortuitous that no-one could fly anyway. I’ve done a couple of Zoom (which appears to now be a verb, a generic trademark and a proper noun) panel and presentation things now so we wanted to pay with the format a bit. Inspired by Marie Foulston’s Party in a Spreadsheet we decided to do a panel in a spreadsheet. So for ‘Conditional Values‘ we decided to invite Monika Bielskyte and Pinar Yoldas to take us on a tour of their worlds through the medium of Google docs. The panel was about worlds, how they’re modelled and visualised so it seems appropriate to use a spreadsheet since they’re so foundational to the way the world is currently modelled, especially under Covid it seems. We were a little nervous about how it would go and it seemed to take quite a bit of technical fiddling to get it working right but it was really fun. I’ve embedded the video below and it’s up on the Haunted Machines site – which really needs a redesign tbh.
Also, back during London Design Festival, Supra Systems Studio ran a series of events over a week and I hosted one – What Worlds World Worlds? –with Annie Goh, David King and Deborah Tchoudjinnoff where we also talked about world-building. Video’s up on the website here. You might recognise that holding image too.
Short Stuff
- I found a solution to the progressive and apparently intentional worsening of Evernote – Keep It. It’s absolutely perfect, super simple and does everything I want: Stores PDFs in a folder, you can drag webpages in and they become PDFs, allows you to search in the PDFs and you can highlight the text which is a feature that is bafflingly beyond Evernote despite every PDF reader being able to do it. Plus it’s only £18/year as opposed to the £70/year that Evernote swallows to add features like… er paying extra to annotate?
Anyway, I’ve started migrating my library across as I come across papers, essays and so on I need and I’m loving it so far. I mean, look how easy this is! ↓
- Thanks Honor Harger for drawing this Cyber-agri-punk Russian design fiction from Birchpunk to my attention. Seems to be a bit of zeitgeist in this kind of thing at the moment, but this is particularly well done. The CGI is really good.
- There should probably be a third one, but there isn’t. You made it this far so it’s not like you’re going to quit now. Oh, did you know that Utah monolith has disappeared? People are the worst, they just can’t help themselves but be the worst. I suppose the parks people did say they’d have to remove it to prevent people trying to find it getting lost or injured which seems fair enough. Maybe the folks who found it should have just said nothing.
Ok, that is it. You now that I love you, I really do. Let me know if you want to hang out or chat at all. I really enjoy meeting new people. Bye.